Thanks for Recommendations for my List

Thanks to several folks who responded to my list of the 100 short story collections I most enjoyed in the first ten years of the 21st century. I am happy to respond to your suggestions.

One of the books recommended was Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America, which I have read and liked. However, it was published first in 1998, and I was focusing only on those published 2001 to the present. The same goes for Gina Berriault’s Women in Their Beds, published in 1997, but which I still plan to read.

Another reader asked me what I thought about Andre Dubus’s Dancing After Hours. Although that one was also published in the last century (1996), it is one of my favorites. I once wrote a tribute to Dubus for a special collection honoring him. Here is what I think:
The most interesting stories in Dancing After Hours focus on the character of LuAnn, introduced in "Falling in Love," when she meets Ted Briggs, a wounded Viet Nam vet and the two dance delicately around beginning a relationship. In "The Timing of Sin," LuAnn, now married to Ted, discovers just how tenuous marital commitment is when she "almost commits adultery," but is saved because of a mundane, or perhaps spiritual, impediment. Finally, in "Out of the Snow," LuAnn fights off rape by two strangers with such rage that she is astonished at her ferocity. The two longest stories in the collection--"Blessings" and "Dancing in the Dark"--are the two most communal; both are about what gives people character and what holds them together in face of adversity. In this latest collection, his seventh, Andre Dubus' stories are, as always, about hope and faith and union; that is, they are romantic and religious. But only the most callous would call them corny.

I was also asked what I thought about Carol Shields’ Collected Stories. It is on my 100 list as a “favorite.” Here is what I thought about some of the stories:

That many of the central characters in Shields’ stories are artists should alert the reader to the fact that she is using the form to play little literary games about the nature of the imagination. For example, “Invention” begins with typical little Shields’ examinations of seemingly trivial inventions such as the steering wheel muff, but becomes a story about the invention of invention itself, that is, the discovery of how art itself comes into being, when a Greek shepherd boy makes the startling discovery that he can dream by day as well as by night. In “Windows,” a window tax is imposed on the citizenry, making the economy minded board up their sources of light. However, in a classic example of art triumphing over reality, a couple of painters paint a window over their boarded-up one, providing themselves not with real light but with the idea of light, which is even more alluring than light itself, the art window becoming ever better than a real window in its presentation of all that is ideal and desirable in the sensuous world. The only previously unpublished story in the collection is “Segue,” the first chapter of a novel Shields was working on when she died, which her daughter prepared for publication. About a 67-year-old woman who writes a sonnet every fourteen days, the piece stands alone as an independent story about Carol Shield’s fascination with frozen moments of transcendence created within the seeming restrictions of literary form.

Someone asked me what I thought about Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. I liked it and posted a blog entry on it July 8, 2009

Someone also mentioned Jean Thompson’s 1979 collection Gasoline Wars. I am currently finishing her most recent collection Do Not Deny Me, which I like so far, and which is on my list of 100 Favorites. I will try to comment on it when I get the time (so much to read and write!).

Also, I have not forgotten two readers who asked me to comment on Claire Keegan’s Walk the Blue Fields, which I recently read and liked very much and will post on as soon as I can, and James Lasdun’s It’s Beginning to Hurt, which I also just finished reading and liked very much indeed. I will post on it as soon as I have time.

I am working on a couple of publishing projects right now and am unable to post as often as I would like. But hang in there. I appreciate your responding to my list and I am happy to share my reactions to short stories with you.


I will buy it and read it; thanks.
Karma and Other Stories, Rishi Reddi,
Talking to the Enemy, Avner Mandelman
Kate Walbert, Our Kind

(oops! I forgot that one.
Dan Chaon, Among the Missing
I like Dan Chaon’s stories and have read both Fitting Ends and Among the Missing. I just somehow skipped over him.


And thanks to Hannah Tinti for the courtesy of saying she was “honored” to be on my list. If you haven’t read her Animal Crackers, you might enjoy it. Here’s why I did:

This collection appears to have a marketing gimmick—i.e. elephants, snakes, rabbits, giraffes, and bears, oh my!0—but don’t let that put you off. In the title story, the central character works at a zoo and sometimes puts his head under an elephant’s foot. However, the story is really about a man struggling with his wife’s infidelity and his brutal reaction to it. In “Slim’s Last Ride,” a pet rabbit is cruelly beaten and dismembered. But the story is really about a young boy’s trying to cope with his parents’ divorce. In “How to Revitalize the Snake in Your Life,” a pet boa constrictor is secretly served for dinner. The story, however, is really about a woman’s revenge for being dumped by a cheating man. There are lots of animals in Tinti’s stories, but they are not the whole story; they simply serve as a clever and sardonic spin on a number of age-old themes. In fact, the most interesting story—“Home Sweet Home”—hardly features animals at all; it’s a coldly comic tale of infidelity and murder with a number of grotesque images—dead bodies sprinkled with cornflakes, a papier-mâché head of a child’s dead mother. Whereas the silliest story—“Reasonable Terms”—about a bunch of giraffes who go on strike to demand better living conditions--is almost exclusively about animals. Also interesting and less dependent on animals are “Hit Man of the Year,” about the rise and fall of a professional killer; and “Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus”--about a globe-trotting young woman whose wealthy father has her followed by a couple of ineffective detectives. It is Tinti’s slightly tilted slant at reality and her deadpan tongue-in-cheek tone that makes the stories hard to resist—that and all those fascinating animals, of course.


I read it, didn’t care for it;
Valentines. By Olaf Olafsson.
The Whore’s Child and Other Stories by Richard Russo.
A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies. By John Murray
Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
The Boat, Nam Lee

It is this category that is most dicey, but since I admit I did not care for these books, I guess I owe it to my readers to make a brief comment why.

So my next post will be a few comments justifying their exclusion from my List of 100 Favorites

My 100 Favorite Short Story Collections of the Twenty-First Century

To mark the occasion of my 100th posting on the “Reading the Short Story” blog, I am offering a list of my 100 favorite short story collections (so far) of the twenty-first century. I am not naming the list “The Best” of anything, just a roll-call of collections I have read and, for whatever reason—made me laugh, made me think, made me envious, made me glad to love this form—I responded to as a grateful reader. If you have a favorite not on the list, let me know. I will be happy to include it in one of the following lists: (1) I read it, didn’t care for it; (2) I have it, but haven’t read it yet; (3) I will buy it and read it; thanks. (4) oops! I forgot that one.

A Bit on the Side, William Trevor
A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, Amy Bloom
A Kind of Flying, Ron Carlson
After the Quake: Stories, Haruki Murakami
All Aunt Hagar’s Children, Edward P. Jones
All Fall Down, Mary Caponegro
All Things, All at Once, Lee K Abbott
Animal Crackers , Hannah Tinti
At the Jim Bridger, Ron Carlson
Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2, Annie Proulx
Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black, Nadine Gordimer
Between Trains, Barry Callaghan
Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, Maile Meloy
But Come Ye Back, Beth Lordan
Call If You Need Me, Raymond Carver
Changing Planes, Ursula K. Le Guin
Cheating at Canasta, William Trevor
Collected Stories, Carol Shields
Damned If I Do, Percival Everett
Dangerous Laughter, Steven Millhauser
Darling? Heidi Jon Schmidt
Day Out of Days, Sam Shepherd
Dictation: A Quartet, Cynthia Ozick
Dream Stuff, David Malouf
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, ZZ Packer
Fascination, William Boyd
Female Troubles, Antonya Nelson
Fine Just the Way It Is, Annie Proulx
Fugue State, Brian Evenson
Georgia Under Water, Heather Sellers
Ghosts of Wyoming, Alyson Hagy
Girl With a Monkey, Leonard Michaels
God’s Gym, John Edgar Wideman
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,
Alice Munro
Honored Guest, Joy Williams
How To Breathe Underwater, Julie Orringer
I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, William Gay
I Sailed with Magellan, Stuart Dybek
I, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting With My Daddy,
Ellen Gilchrist
Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories, Joan Silber
In Persuasion Nation, George Saunders
It’s Beginning to Hurt, James Lasdun
Little Black Book of Stories, A.S. Byatt
Loot and Other Stories, Nadine Gordimer
Manhattan Monologues, Louis Auchincloss
Matters of Life and Death, Bernard MacLaverty
Miracle Boy and Other Stories, Pinckney Benedict
Mrs. Hempel Chronicles, Sarah Shun-Lien Brynum
My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales, Robert Antoni
Nice Big American Baby,Judy Budnitz
North of Nowhere, South of Loss, Janette Turner Hospital
Nothing Right, Antonya Nelson
Once the Shore, Paul Yoon
One Hour in Paradise, Joan Leegant
One More Year, Sana Krasikov
Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Danyal Mueenuddin
Our Story Begins, Tobias Wolff
Pastoralia, George Saunders
Rescue Missions, Frederick Busch
Runaway, Alice Munro
The Secret Goldfish, David Means
Servants of the Map, Andrea Barrett
Something for the Journey, Richard Cortez Day
Sonechka, Ludmila Ulitskaya
Ten Little Indians, Sherman Alexie
The Apple’s Bruise, Lisa Glatt
The Collected Stories of Clare Boylan
The Collected Stories of Richard Yates
The Dead Fish Museum, Charles D’Ambrosio
The Development, John Barth
The Dog of the Marriage, Amy Hempel
The Early Stories, John Updike
The Hermit’s Story, Rick Bass
The King in the Tree, Steven Millhauser
The Laws of Evening, Mary Yukari Waters
The Lemon Table, Julian Barnes
The One Marvelous Thing, Rikki Ducornet
The Red Convertible, Louise Erdrich
The Secret Goldfish, David Means
The Smallest People Alive, Keith Banner
The Spot, David Means
The Stories of Alice Adams
The Stories of Mary Gordon
The Teapots Are Out and Other Eccentric
Tales from Ireland, John B Keane
The Turning, Tim Winton
The View from Castle Rock, Alice Munro
There a Petal Silently Falls, Choe-Yun
Things That Fall from the Sky, Kevin Brockmeier
Tooth and Claw, T. C. Boyle
Twilight of the Superheroes, Deborah Eisenberg
Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri
Walk the Blue Fields, Claire Keegan
What's Come Over You? Marian Thurm
White Wall: Collected Stories, Tatyana Tolstaya
Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work,
Jason Brown
Wild Child, T.C. Boyle
Yesterday’s Weather, Anne Enright
Young Irelanders, Gerard Donovan
Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail, Bobbi Ann Mason